Under the hoods of the skinniest laptops, and in the hollows of the latest desktop-PC motherboards, solid-state storage has undergone a transformation. For those currently packing the lower capacity Steam Decks bagging the 512GB Sabrent drive is a no-brainer.

Moving from the mechanical world of hard drives to the silicon world of SSDs brought rapid improvements in performance, technology, capacities, and reliability. If you can forgo a bit of storage space, it'll certainly blow whatever eMMC SSD the 64GB Deck's touting out of the water. That combination is common to many of the best SSDs, including the highly regarded Seagate FireCuda 530 and Kingston KC3000.As for the actual flash memory used, it's SK Hynix's latest and very greatest 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. KIOXIA Corporation defines “RoHS Compatible” products as products that either ( i ) contain no more than a maximum concentration value of 0. It turned in sizzling throughput speeds, and did well in both our gaming and general storage benchmarks.

If that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, it also doesn't help that SK Hynix isn't the most familiar brand regarding the sort of consumer-focused clobber that's aimed at gamers, including SSDs. Embedded with Samsung's cutting-edge thermal control algorithm, the 980 PRO manages heat on its own to deliver durable and reliable performance. We've come to expect higher-end Gen4 drives to rely on Phison's very popular E18 controller, but the Lexar doesn't. The SSD Utility management software was designed to help your KIOXIA drive thrive and lets you be in control of maintenance, monitoring and more!SK Hynix's Platinum P41 might just have the edge on performance, but the lead is so negligible that the less expensive SN850X is our pick of the current SSD crop. Make sure the width and especially the length (expressed in millimeters) will work in the space available for the drive. To ensure stable performance, the 980 PRO uses nickel coating to help manage the controller's heat level and a heat spreader label to deliver effective thermal control of the NAND chip.